Time takes its toll on cemetery

Larry Camp is chairman of The Old Burying Ground Foundation, a group devoted to preserving the cemetery at the corner of Barrington Street and Spring Garden Road. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

It tells the story of love and death, rapscallions and paupers, petty crime, heroic service, beloved infants and heartbroken parents.

Halifax’s Old Burying Grounds, home to about 12,000 souls, is a treasured piece of Halifax history.

But that history is under constant threat from the effects of time itself — and from Halifax’s notoriously fickle winters.

The Old Burying Ground Foundation, a group devoted to preserving the cemetery at the corner of Barrington Street and Spring Garden Road, is now overseeing work that aims to protect it from further deterioration.

Looming above the lichen-covered headstones and their timeworn inscriptions is a stately looking lion that was, until recently, at peril of eventually slipping off its perch.

Perhaps known best as the Sebastopol monument, the Welsford-Parker monument was dedicated in 1860 to Major Augustus Welsford and Capt. William Parker, two Nova Scotians who died during the Crimean War in Sebastopol, located in present-day Ukraine.

The Old Burying Ground Foundation’s chairman, Larry Camp, said the group took action to repair the monument when members noticed mortar from the structure on the ground below.

“When you see that, you know that you’ve got problems,” Camp said.

The foundation hired a masonry company to conduct repairs that were estimated to cost about $5,700. But once the scaffolding went up and workers began to investigate, they discovered that the damage was more pervasive.

Due to the freezing and thawing cycle of Halifax winters, some of the large stones that support the lion sculp­ture had begun to move around slightly.

The sculpture is now largely covered in scaffolding and wood as workers labour to remedy the cracks and faults that threaten its stability.

The repair’s price tag ballooned to $18,000 once the full extent of the dam­age became apparent.

In addition to paying for the repairs on the Welsford-Parker monument, the foundation is sharing with Parks Cana­da the $40,000 cost of preserving some of the cemetery’s headstones and foot­stones.

A stone mason is tackling the most fragile of the 1,300 or so grave markers, which represent just a small fraction of the buried.

Camp said during the nearly 100-year period when the cemetery was open for burials, some residents who were too poor to pay for a funeral simply walked in during the night, buried their family member and marked the spot with a wooden cross.

“And of course you know what would happen to wooden crosses over time," Camp said. “They would just fall down and rot away and therefore the bodies were never really identified."

The foundation hopes to complete the monument’s repair work before two ceremonies that will commemorate the soldiers and sailors who died in the War of 1812. One ceremony is scheduled for June 2013 and the other for September 2014.

The cost of all the repairs is a bit hard to swallow for the volunteer-run group that relies on donations and govern­ment funding to maintain the cemetery. But the effort is worth it.

“I love history, and there’s a lot of history in the Old Burying Ground," Camp said. “It’s a gem of a piece of property in the centre of the city and it tells us a lot about our past."